The looming alteration in climate has spurred a veritable industry over the past two decades of overly simplistic scenario modeling and theoretical predictions of future changes brought about by global warming, some based on research on human responses to fluctuations in rainfall and temperature in the past. Scholars who stress the complexity of climate and social processes have critiqued such crude models from two different approaches: resilience thinking and political ecology. In this article, I assess the resilience framework through an analysis of the effects of droughts over a long time perspective, between circa 1800 and 1950, in two East African communities: the Kamba of Kenya and the Gogo of Tanzania. My conclusion is that political ecology theory provides a better explanation than the resilience approach. In both cases, rather than primarily adapting to climate events, the ability of communities and households to cope with droughts varied depending on how they were integrated into regional economies and the world system when those droughts occurred. The effects of droughts and long‐term fluctuations in precipitation were mediated through exchange networks, the flow of currencies, and the processes of stratification in local resource control, which in turn affected land use and settlement patterns.

中文翻译：

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批判韧性思维：19世纪东非干旱的政治生态学分析

在过去的二十年中，气候迫在眉睫的变化刺激了一个名副其实的行业，这是一个过于简单的情景建模和对全球变暖带来的未来变化的理论预测，其中一些基于对人类过去对降雨和温度波动的反应的研究。强调气候和社会过程的复杂性的学者们从两种不同的方法对这种粗略的模型进行了批判：复原力思维和政治生态学。在本文中，我通过对大约1800年至1950年之间两个东非社区（肯尼亚的坎巴和坦桑尼亚的戈戈）的长期干旱影响进行分析，评估了抗灾力框架。我的结论是，政治生态理论比弹性方法提供了更好的解释。在这两种情况下 社区和家庭应对干旱的能力并没有首先适应气候事件，而是取决于干旱发生时它们如何融入区域经济和世界体系。干旱和降雨的长期波动的影响是通过交换网络，货币流通和地方资源控制的分层过程来介导的，而这反过来又影响了土地的使用和定居方式。